Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Alex seemed to have to think about that for a moment.

  “Polchak,” he said.

  “What’s your address?”

  “Um, 3213 University Boulevard, Upper Tyson, Ohio.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “What year is it?”

  “It’s 1483,” Alex said.

  “No, no! What year are we supposed to be in?”

  Alex frowned apologetically.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Chip and I really do belong in 1483. This is where we’re supposed to be. I know you’re trying to make sure I remember the twenty-first century. And I do. I just remember 1483 better right now.”

  Katherine had the same look on her face that she’d always gotten when she was a little kid preparing to explode into a massive temper tantrum. Jonah didn’t think screaming and pounding her fists on the floor would help.

  “Chill,” he told his sister. He slipped off the bed and sat down on the floor with the other kids. “Okay, 1483. That’s what, about the time Christopher Columbus sailed? Maybe we’ll get to be cabin boys on the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María. Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much. Just think of this as a big adventure.”

  “Columbus was 1492,” Katherine hissed. “Are you forgetting things now too? Remember—it rhymes. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” A panicked look spread across her face. “Oh my gosh. We’re in some godforsaken time when Columbus hasn’t even discovered America yet!”

  “Technically, it’s not really accurate to say he ‘discovered’ it, since the Native Americans had been living there for centuries,” Alex said, sounding much more like himself. “And anyhow, Columbus sailed from Spain, and we’re in England, and it’s not like the twenty-first century, where you can just hop on a plane and be in another country in an hour.”

  Jonah was delighted to hear Alex sounding logical again.

  “And really, Katherine,” Chip said earnestly. Jonah wouldn’t have said that Chip was capable of being earnest. Sarcasm was more his style. But—Jonah peered at his friend carefully—Chip’s face was as smooth and innocent as a choirboy’s. He kept talking. “It’s not fair to say that this time period is godforsaken just because Europeans don’t know about America yet. God is just about all he thinks about.” He pointed at his tracer, who now had his head leaned back against the wall. His lips were moving silently. He seemed to be praying again.

  “Him, too,” Alex said, gesturing toward his own tracer, who was curled up against his brother’s shoulder and appeared now to be fast asleep. “And it’s so weird, because back in the twenty-first century I thought I was an atheist or an agnostic—I didn’t think it even mattered which one. I didn’t care. But thinking with his brain … well, I could believe. And it wasn’t like thinking that the stars revolved around the earth—thinking something I knew was false. It’s—I don’t know. I can’t explain.”

  “It helps,” Chip said simply. “Edward should be terrified out of his skull, he’s that certain that he’s going to be killed, and that there’s nothing he can do about it. But he’s just … fine.”

  Jonah considered arguing, Well, I believe in God too, but I’m still terrified out of my skull—what do you make of that? But he didn’t think that would be very useful.

  Katherine took a deep breath.

  “You’re using third person again,” she said.

  “Huh?” Chip asked.

  “Third person,” Katherine said. “Him. His. He. You’re not talking anymore like you think you’re them.”

  She swept her hand dismissively toward the tracers, her fingers swiping through Edward V’s leg. She didn’t even notice.

  “It fades a little, doesn’t it?” Alex said speculatively. “The longer we’re away from them. We could set up an experiment—see if we experience their minds more intensely with a longer stay in the tracers, see how much our memories fade over time—”

  “No!” Katherine and Jonah said together. They exchanged glances.

  “What if you forget your real selves completely?” Katherine argued. She looked flushed and frantic, still not far away from some childish tantrum. A long strand of hair had escaped from her ponytail and was plastered to her cheek with sweat. Jonah wondered if she was still feeling the effects of timesickness.

  “Which are our real selves?” Alex asked quietly. He turned his head, gazing longingly toward the tracers on the bed.

  Chip had the same expression on his face. Jonah could just see the thoughts churning in their heads.

  Jonah dived to the right. He rose up on his knees and stuck his arms out straight, his best imitation of a traffic cop refusing to let anyone pass.

  “You can’t go back to them,” Jonah said. He hoped his body was blocking everyone’s view of the tracers. “How could you? You said yourself, they’re doomed.”

  “But what if that’s our fate?” Chip said, just as Alex objected, “I didn’t say they were doomed.”

  Chip looked at Alex in surprise. Jonah wondered why he hadn’t noticed they were brothers from the very beginning: They had the same blond curly hair, the same blue eyes, the same high cheekbones. Noble high cheekbones. Royal looking. Even with their hair cut in a twenty-first-century style, now that they were back in the fifteenth century, both of them did look like they could be princes or kings.

  “Really?” Chip was saying. “Your guy—Richard—he doesn’t think they’re both going to die?”

  “I told you,” Alex said. “He thinks his mother has a plan. He knows.”

  “Mother,” Chip repeated, as though he was trying out the word. “The queen. Former queen, I mean. Elizabeth.”

  “Queen Elizabeth?” Katherine shrieked. “The old-timey one? Wait a minute—I know about her. The one Cate Blanchett always plays in the movies?”

  Chip and Alex considered this.

  “No, that’s another Queen Elizabeth,” Chip said. “Later on.”

  Katherine looked defeated.

  Chip had his head tilted to the side thoughtfully.

  “It’s like, I know about the mother’s plan, but I don’t have much confidence in it,” he said. “She’s not … I mean, I barely know her.”

  “That’s because you were sent to another estate at a young age,” Alex said. “To be trained to know how to be king.”

  Chip bit down on his lip, wonderment traveling across his face.

  “I do know how to be king,” he said. “Weird.”

  “But you don’t know your own mother?” Katherine asked incredulously.

  “I only see her a few times a year,” he said, shrugging. He grinned, looking more like himself. “But I’ve heard things, when people don’t know I’m listening. I think she was supposed to be a real babe when she was younger. There was some sort of a scandal when our father married her—like she wasn’t good enough because she wasn’t a foreign princess who could bring him extra allies, and she’d been married to a Lancaster knight who died, and we’re Yorks, of course, and the Lancasters and the Yorks hate each other. … Our parents got married in secret, so that was even more scandalous.”

  “Were people horrified when your mother got pregnant with you? And they didn’t know she was married?” Katherine asked. In spite of herself, she was leaning in now, intrigued, like this was just some juicy celebrity gossip.

  “Oh, the news came out a long time before that,” Chip said. “Our father’s advisers were really mad.” He thought for a minute. “Anyhow, I have three older sisters, so it’s not like I would have been the big surprise, regardless.”

  Chip still had a stunned look on his face, like it’d just dawned on him that he really did have siblings.

  “What happened to your father?” Jonah asked quietly. He couldn’t shake the feeling he’d had earlier, when he was thinking about The Lion King. There was an uncle in the movie, too. Scar. He gasped, remembering the entire plot now.

  “Did your uncle kill your father?” he asked in a choked voice.

  But both Chip and Alex were shaking
their heads.

  “Nah,” Chip said. “He just got sick and died.”

  “Maybe he was poisoned,” Jonah said. Scar killed Simba’s father, he thought. It was awful when remembering Disney movies terrified you.

  Alex snorted.

  “Nobody had to poison him,” he said. “He was kind of a … a party animal.”

  “And bulimic, right?” Chip asked. “Isn’t that what you’d call it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “Hundreds of years before anybody came up with that name. Remember Christmas?” As Chip nodded, Alex turned to Jonah and Katherine to explain. “He ate and drank, ate and drank—roast beef and puddings and everything else—and then he threw it all up to make room to stuff himself again.”

  “They have bingeing and purging in the fifteenth century?” Katherine asked, making a disgusted face.

  “Oh, yeah. We call it ‘eating in the Roman style,’” Alex said. “It’s a sign of wealth, that someone can afford that much food.”

  Strangely, Alex and Chip both had admiring looks on their faces. Katherine looked like Jonah felt: like she wanted to gag.

  “That’s just gross!” she said.

  Alex and Chip looked insulted.

  “But he was a good king,” Chip added quickly. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Of course,” Alex agreed, nodding loyally. “Edward the Fourth. Our father.”

  Our, Jonah thought. So much for Katherine’s being excited that they were using third-person pronouns.

  The candle by the bedside flickered, as if some new breeze had entered the room. Jonah turned just in time to see the door slowly sliding forward.

  “Someone’s coming again!” he hissed. “Hide!”

  Jonah scrambled up, ready to rush back to the other room. Katherine was right beside him. But Chip and Alex weren’t moving at all. Wait—yes, they were. They were both leaning toward their tracers.

  “This way!” Jonah whispered, grabbing the hood of Chip’s sweatshirt and yanking. “Katherine—get Alex!”

  Katherine tugged on Alex’s arm, but all that did was counter his forward momentum. She wasn’t strong enough to pull him backward. Jonah caught a glimpse of her horrified face as she glanced back toward the door, now open a full inch and still moving.

  Katherine bent over and blew out the candle.

  SIX

  Jonah could still see—a little, anyway—by the gleaming light of the ghostly tracer boys. They still huddled on the bed, one praying, one sleeping, each still oblivious to the moving door.

  Chip and Alex, the modern versions, seemed nearly as oblivious.

  “You just changed history!” Chip hissed angrily at Katherine. “Even a single candle extinguished—”

  “I had to!” Katherine whispered back. “We have to save you!”

  Jonah kept watching the door, still creaking open, slowly, slowly, slowly. … Maybe this would just be another serving girl. Maybe she’d see the darkness, assume both boys were asleep, and tiptoe away.

  Or maybe it was the uncle, come to murder them. Maybe his job would be that much easier in the darkness.

  “Mother promised she’d send someone to rescue us!” Alex exulted in a loud whisper.

  Jonah clapped his hand over Alex’s mouth. Never mind saving Alex and Chip from history—how could Jonah save them from themselves? How could Jonah keep Alex quiet, pull Chip back into hiding, get Katherine and Alex safely out of sight too … and somehow relight the blown-out candle? All before the door opened another inch wider?

  It was impossible. Jonah didn’t even have time to take a breath before the figures of two men appeared in the doorway.

  They had a candle of their own.

  Fortunately, the puny candle glow barely illuminated the floor directly in front of them, so Jonah didn’t have to worry about being seen yet. He found himself wishing the men carried a slightly stronger light—he wanted to see their faces. It wasn’t that he thought he’d recognize anyone from the fifteenth century. But surely if he could see their expressions, he’d know if they were planning murder or rescue. Wouldn’t he?

  It didn’t matter. The men’s faces were cloaked in shadow thicker than beards, their eye sockets like dark holes.

  Then one of the men spoke.

  “I thought the young prince always had to have a candle burning at night,” he said softly. “Afraid of the dark, they say.”

  And for a split second there was a bit of light around his mouth, the same kind of light that glowed from the tracer boys on the bed.

  That isn’t what he said in the original version of history, Jonah thought. That’s the only reason I can see his mouth. It’s moving differently just because Katherine blew out that candle. …

  The other man shrugged and laid a finger on his lips. This must have been the same thing he’d done the first time around, because no tracer light glowed on him.

  “Hush,” he whispered. “If we can do this whilst they slumber, ’twill be easier.”

  “I slumber not,” Chip spoke up, loudly, boldly.

  Oh, no! Why hadn’t Jonah put his hand over Chip’s mouth too?

  Jonah froze. Should he inch back from Chip and Alex—save himself now that he couldn’t save them? Maybe grab Katherine, too …

  Katherine dug her elbow into Jonah’s ribs. She pointed, a hard motion to follow in the near-total darkness. But Jonah saw that she wanted him to look at the bed, where Chip’s tracer was sitting up straight, his mouth moving precisely in sync with Chip’s next words: “Who goes there?”

  “Friends,” the man replied in a hushed voice. “Your mother, the fair Queen Elizabeth, sent us to rescue you. …”

  “I told you!” Alex whispered.

  The men seemed not to hear him, because they were speaking themselves—Jonah missed their words—and then they bowed low, their flickering candle dipping down, their boots scraping back against the stone floor.

  “They’re going to walk to the bed,” Chip whispered, pulling away from Jonah’s grasp. “They’re going to walk to the bed, and if we’re not there—if they can’t see the tracers—they’ll …”

  He was already rising toward the glowing figures on the bed.

  “Wait!” Jonah whispered back. “Can’t you wait to see if they’re really going to rescue you? Are they friends? Or murderers?”

  “I can’t know that unless I’m in my tracer!” Chip hissed. “Alex, come on!”

  The two men were approaching the bed, the glow of their candle growing dangerously near.

  Alex was jerking away from Jonah too.

  “Let them go!” Katherine whispered in Jonah’s ear. “They’ll know in a minute if it’s safe or not—we can pull them out. …”

  Quickly Alex and Chip scrambled onto the bed, matching their poses with their tracers’.

  Jonah had forgotten that the tracers would stop glowing. He blinked at the sudden darkening. The shadowy men in their little circle of candlelight were advancing faster, rushing toward the bed.

  Do you know yet? Jonah wanted to scream at Alex and Chip. Are they rescuers or murderers? He reached blindly toward the bed, his fingers brushing fabric. It felt like something more stiff and formal than sweatshirt material—was it velvet, maybe?—but he tugged anyway. If the men really were friends, wouldn’t Chip and Alex have recognized them by now? Couldn’t Chip separate from his tracer long enough to let Jonah know if he was safe or not?

  Before Jonah could get a good grip, Katherine started pulling him back. The circle of candlelight was almost at Jonah’s feet. Before he moved away, the plastic tip of his shoelace gleamed dully in the light.

  Jonah prayed that neither of the men was looking in his direction.

  They weren’t. They had their eyes fastened on the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, both boys bathed in the light from the candle. It seemed like a 100-watt glow to Jonah right now—it was much too bright for Jonah or Katherine to dart in and pull either boy away.

  The men bowed before the tracer/Chip and tracer/Alex, the
light dipping only briefly.

  “Your Highnesses,” the first man murmured.

  The second man reached his candle toward the candle Katherine had blown out, and a second flame sprang to life. The intensified glow of the two candles, plus the glow of the man’s tracer, still hunched in a bow, sent Katherine and Jonah scurrying backward, desperate not to be seen. Just as the man blew out the first candle and rejoined his tracer—dimming the light again—Jonah’s head hit something soft. He reached his hands behind him and found that some sort of cloth wall hanging covered the stones near the window, reaching practically down to the ground. Somewhere else to hide if we have to, he told himself.

  Back by the bed the two men were straightening up from their bows. Then they reached out and grabbed the two boys.

  “No!” the tracer boy/Chip screamed.

  The man holding him crammed his hand over Chip’s face.

  “Shh! Someone will hear!” the man hissed. “This is for thine own good! We’re helping you!”

  Chip struggled against the man’s grasp. He seemed to be fighting harder than the tracer boy—his arms and legs lashed out, leaving the tracer’s glowing limbs behind. But he couldn’t break the man’s hold.

  Alex was faring no better, and glowing even more. The tracer boy still seemed to be sleeping, even as Alex squirmed, momentarily separating, rejoining the tracer, separating, rejoining. …

  “What should we do?” Katherine whispered urgently in Jonah’s ear.

  Jonah watched the men and the struggling boys. Even in the dim, flickering light Jonah could see that both of the men were tall and strong and muscular—he and Katherine could never overpower them.

  But maybe they wouldn’t have to.

  “You try to grab Alex, and I’ll get Chip,” Jonah whispered back. “They’re starting to separate from their tracers already—just pull them away. …”

  “Without being seen?” Katherine asked incredulously. “Without them noticing? That’s impossible!”

  She was right. They could either rescue Chip and Alex, or they could stay out of sight and keep up the illusion that history was proceeding along its normal path.